Israel's Last Chance

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When Hamas bulldozed its way across the Gaza fence on October 7, 2023, it hoped to eventually provoke the opprobrium that's now flowing in Israel's direction. Launching its carnival of murder, rape, and kidnapping, the group wagered that it could bait its enemy into moral blunders that would discredit it in the eyes of the world.
That vision is now unfolding as mass hunger engulfs the Gaza Strip, and images of starving children crumble American support for Israel. The fact that Hamas ignited this chain of events, and that it could end the war if wanted to, does nothing to absolve Israel of its primary role in the food crisis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government bears responsibility for policies that are now depriving Gazans of adequate nourishment and may soon kill them in staggering numbers. It was his cabinet that imposed a blockade on Gaza starting on March 2. The measure was eventually reversed under international pressure. Still, the subsequent damage was a deliberate choice, because even after Israel lifted its siege, it further limited the ability of the United Nations to distribute relief.
[Read: Food aid in Gaza has become a horror]
Israel executed these policies in the name of achieving Netanyahu's implausible goal of 'total victory.' Food, in his government's analysis, had become a weapon used by Hamas to sustain its fighters, reward loyalty, and replenish its armaments through black-market profiteering. The United Nations, Israeli officials believed, was at best excessively tolerant of terrorists in Gaza. By wresting control of aid distribution from the world organization, Israel hoped to cut Hamas off from one of its last remaining sources of power.
But the policy has failed on its own terms. Hamas is no closer to surrendering or releasing hostages than before Israel embarked on its campaign of deprivation. A movement animated by theological fervor—and strengthened by the spectacle of civilian suffering—cannot be starved into submission. And now that the toll of hunger is becoming so clear, Israel has an obligation to reverse course as quickly as possible.
When there is hunger, the blazingly obvious solution is food. Humanitarian groups have a cliché for what's needed in Gaza: 'flooding the zone' with food. That would require Israel to lift restrictions and bureaucratic impediments that it has imposed on the UN agencies it loathes.
Flooding the zone is not just a humanitarian imperative; it is a strategic one for Israel. The food crisis is alienating bedrock allies in the U.S. Congress. When Israel launched its response to the atrocities of October 7, with the goal of dismantling Hamas, I considered the war just and necessary. But international law prohibits some tactics in order to protect the innocent and to prevent the perverse exigencies of conflict from disfiguring the soul of the warrior. Even if Israel is prepared to endure international isolation, allegiances it once considered unbreakable won't survive famine. By flooding the zone, Israel would be rescuing itself.
Just before Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza in early March, a cease-fire prevailed. During the calm, the price of flour—the clearest indicator of a population's nutritional access—plummeted from about $135 for a 25-kilogram sack to just $14 in February. The United Nations, along with the nongovernmental organizations that it coordinates, imported more aid during that period than at any point in the previous eight months: 295,120 tons in total. Although this was hardly a cornucopia, the surge of food and medicine averted large-scale starvation.
The role the United Nations played in this effort wasn't unusual. In major humanitarian crises caused by war—for example, in Sudan and Ukraine—the UN serves as the primary mechanism for coordinating the care of civilians displaced by conflict. In Gaza, its role ran even deeper: For decades, the UN had provided not just emergency relief but also the basic infrastructure of daily life—education, housing, food.
Even as Israel and the UN collaborated on the movement of trucks and the flow of aid, they regarded each other as hostile entities. Israel had legitimate reasons for suspicion. For years, schools administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza used textbooks glorifying violent resistance. After the October 7 attacks, Israel published intelligence showing that 12 UNRWA employees directly participated in the massacre. To many Israelis, the agency's very existence affirmed a long-standing belief that the UN reflexively condemns Israel while overlooking Hamas's genocidal rhetoric.
[Photos: Gaza's starvation and chaos]
On March 2, the Netanyahu government made a calculated decision to blow up this system. It didn't just block the entry of all goods, including food. That move preluded a string of policies that seem intended to permanently push the UN out of Gaza.
By summer, Israel had refused to renew the visas of top officials at three UN agencies operating in Gaza. (These officials had publicly condemned Israel's obstructionism, voicing accusations of genocide, collective punishment, and political sabotage—rhetoric that infuriated Israeli leaders.) Aid groups navigated a growing tangle of permits and bureaucratic impositions that made the UN's relief efforts in Gaza unworkable. New restrictions gave the government the right to demand the names and contact details of Palestinian staffers and ban any group whose employees have questioned Israel's existence as a Jewish, democratic state.
To replace the UN presence, Israel worked with the Trump administration to hastily design a new system to feed Gaza. Where the old international agencies were run by technical experts and experienced professionals, the new system was concocted by management consultants and private security contractors under the aegis of a newly created nonprofit, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Where the UN had tried to address the full spectrum of civilian needs—medicine, sanitation, nutrition—the GHF largely focuses on food, distributing boxes and bags in just four sites, all in areas fully controlled by the Israeli military, none of them in northern Gaza. This plan transgressed fundamental principles that guide humanitarian work, and the UN announced that it wanted nothing to do with GHF.
The result was predictably disastrous. Hundreds of Palestinians were shot while mobbing soldiers during chaotic food distributions. Whatever the faults of the UN, it remains the world's most capable relief agency. And in Gaza, it had a network of warehouses, bakeries, and kitchens and a pool of local employees. Flooding the zone is simply not possible unless Israel restores the visas of international-aid workers and allows them to operate without the labyrinthine restrictions currently paralyzing their work.
A primary impediment to providing ample food is epistemic closure. That is, many Israelis simply don't believe the warnings of famine, because they doubt the veracity of the evidence. They say that the UN has a history of predicting catastrophes in Gaza that never come to pass. But this time is genuinely different. The price of a sack of flour, which by the end of May had skyrocketed to about $500, tells the story. And although intermittent shortages do not always lead to famine, the nature of a prolonged crisis is that it grinds down the resilience of both the human body and entire communities.
Jeremy Konyndyk, the head of Refugees International, who oversaw disaster relief for the Obama administration, told me: 'In the early months of the war, if you cut off all the food, people are starting from a place where they're still healthy. They still have money and resources. They have assets they can sell. There are still stockpiles of food. So there's a lot more of what we in humanitarian terms would call a 'coping mechanism.'' But those mechanisms, he said, are now gone.
That's true not just for the recipients of aid but also for those delivering it. Relief networks rely heavily on Gazans to move and distribute food. 'Like on an airplane,' Konyndyk said, 'you put on your own mask before helping others. That applies here. We need to stabilize the aid providers in order to enable them to scale up the operation.'
[Read: The corrupt bargain behind Gaza's catastrophe]
The thoroughfares that would carry food to the hungry are in no better shape. Sixty-eight percent of Gaza's roads are damaged, according to the UN, and will require Israeli engineers to regrade and pave them. (Israeli crews have made roads passable on multiple occasions over the course of the war.) David Satterfield, a longtime American diplomat who coordinated the distribution of aid in Gaza during the Biden administration, told me that the continued warfare has 'just physically disrupted the ability of aid implementers to get their stuff to warehouses, from warehouses to distribution points.'
As hunger deepens, trucks navigating these roads become ever more vulnerable to mobs desperate to plunder the contents. Crowds descend to loot out of fear that waiting in line means getting nothing. Humanitarians call this 'self-distribution.' There is no functioning government to secure the convoys. Even if Gaza were inundated with food, the looting would likely persist—until the supply became so reliable that people stopped fearing it might vanish.
Every image of a child with protruding ribs is both a human tragedy and a propaganda victory for Hamas—and proof of how a just war badly lost the plot. I believed in Israel's casus belli. I don't believe in this. No justification can redeem the immorality of a policy built on deprivation. As Gaza braces for the worst, Israel still has a narrow window to correct its course. By flooding the zone, Israel has one last chance to redeem itself.
Article originally published at The Atlantic
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